1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data processing apparatus including plural transmission units, and more particularly, to a data processing apparatus, a data transmission method, and a computer-readable recording medium for transmitting data from one or more of the plural transmission units.
2. Description of the Related Art
A data processing apparatus (e.g., image forming apparatus), which is connected to other data processing apparatuses (hereinafter also referred to as “client”) via a network, can transmit data (e.g., image data) from an image forming apparatus to a user via the client. Therefore, the data processing apparatus has stored an address book of users. Data can be directly input to the address book from a control panel of the data processing apparatus or input from an external apparatus (See, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2003-323269). Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2003-323269 discloses a method of grouping addresses and handling the addresses in groups for improving operability of an external apparatus.
A data processing apparatus is equipped with plural transmission units (e.g., electronic mail, facsimile machine). Conventionally, whenever the user (sender) switches the application used for transmitting data (e.g., copier application, scanner application, printer application, facsimile application), the transmission unit capable of transmitting data based on the switched to application is identified. Then, by selecting the destination for the data transmission, the identified application transmits data to the selected destination.
Recent data processing apparatuses are equipped with a “transmission application” dedicated for transmitting data. Further, the transmission application can transmit data to a group having plural users in a batch. Accordingly, the sender selects a group from an address book stored in the data processing apparatus and transmits the data.
In a conventional address book, data of the destinations corresponding to plural transmission units (e.g., mail address, fax number, folder path) are registered with respect to each user. Further, each user belongs to a group. Thus, there may be a case where various destination data correspond to the respective users of the group.
Accordingly, it is difficult for the data processing apparatus to specify the transmission unit used for transmitting the data to the group or the user selected from a screen displayed by the transmission application. For example, in a case where a user having plural destination data is selected as the destination, sending data from all of the transmission units can be troublesome for the sender. Further, in a case where one transmission unit is selected, the sender cannot anticipate which transmission unit is to be used for transmitting the data.